Lois McMaster Bujold: Crime Scenes Tend to Be Book-Free Zones

Photo: Carol Collins

Lois McMaster Bujold, author of the Vorkosigan Saga of space adventure stories, is one of the most acclaimed science fiction authors of all time. She’s won the prestigious Hugo award four times, and every novel she’s written over her 26-year career is still in print. And not only is she entertaining hordes of readers, she may also be fighting crime — at least according to an interview she once read with a forensic pathologist.

“He made the remark, sort of in passing, that he had never gone into a bad crime scene in any house where there were a lot of books,” says Bujold in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “These were all book-free zones.”

She thinks this may be because books have a unique ability to remove you from your current headspace and transport you into the mind of another person — and hopefully increase your empathy for them. Books are, she feels, the closest thing we have to telepathy, and that this is an aspect of reading all too often ignored in literature courses.

“Escapist literature gets a bad rap,” she observes. “But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.”

If it’s true that books make people less violent, then Bujold must be making an ever-growing dent in the crime rate — her latest Vorkosigan novel, Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, just became the first of her books to hit the New York Times Best Sellers list.

Listen to our complete interview with Lois McMaster Bujold in Episode 75 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as Myke Cole, author the Shadow Ops series, joins hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley to discuss soldiers in science fiction.

Lois McMaster Bujold on biotechnology and gender:

“I’m very interested in the impact of biotechnology on the way people live. The most obvious ongoing thing being the Uterine Replicator, the idea of extra-uterine gestation of human beings — and anything else you wanted to do with it — which is, I think, a technology which is perfectly possible and will come. It’s an interesting technology because it totally changes women’s lives, and yet doesn’t make that much difference to guys, which is why I think it doesn’t turn up in science fiction written by men very much … I think 99 percent of women’s lib comes from technology making different kinds of lives possible, and then the social adjustment follows the technology, it doesn’t precede it. The complaints may precede it, but the change follows. So I think that women who are anti-technology are not as in touch with reality as they ought to be.”

Lois McMaster Bujold on the sadder side of cryonics:

“Another aspect of [cryonics] is of course the issue of what happens three generations down the line when the company disbands, when people aren’t interested any more in all these frozen people. Many science-fiction stories that involve cryonics involve freezing somebody, sending them into the future, and letting them be our viewpoint in this future world. But what if it were not one or a few but an entire population? Where would they find room? Who would want them? Who would want to make all this competition? Who wants to thaw their grandparents when they could be having grandchildren? … We want to live forever, but does anyone want us?”

Myke Cole on violence:

“I don’t agree with Asimov’s statement that ‘violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’ I think that violence is a tool, like anything else, and it’s a tool that if employed judiciously and in a thoughtful manner can be effective. And there are cases where organized warfare has ultimately benefited society at large and the world at large — I think a lot of people would argue that Allied resistance to fascism is an example of that. When I was speaking to you before we started recording about Jaish al-Mahdi and about al-Qaeda, there are all kinds of gradients of people who are involved in those organizations. My eyes were not closed to the fact that there were certainly plenty of people who were launching rockets at me while I was over there who were 16-year-old kids who were doing it to try to make enough money to pay off the local crime boss in their neighborhood or feed their sister or whatever, I get that. But at the core of those organizations were committed fanatics who will not rest — they really are like cartoon characters out of B movies — they will not rest until they achieve their goals or until someone destroys them. Granted those are extremely rare cases, but those cases do exist, and in those cases I want violence available as an option to protect myself and that which I hold dear.”

Myke Cole on Halo:

“I’m not a big Halo player, but there’s one thing that burns me, and that’s that the protagonist is the “Master Chief.” Master Chief is an E-9, it’s the highest enlisted rank in the Navy and the Coast Guard, at least in the United States. Master Chiefs are not running around with guns. Master Chiefs are at headquarters administering large numbers of people. When you’re promoted that high, either in the enlisted or officer ranks, one of the disadvantages of that is that you’re no longer slinging a gun in a hallway … If you’re running through the hallways of a Covenant starship with a gun on your hip, I’d say you’d be a first class tops.”